Kiss of the Fur Queen Page 2

  Then he became aware — he must have been dreaming, surely — that this creature of unearthly beauty, the Fur Queen, was wafting towards him with something in her arms, something round and made of silver, carrying the object at waist level, like a sacred vessel, a heart perhaps, a lung, a womb? The goddess stopped in front of him, her face not half a foot away, her eyes burning into his, her person sending off ripples of warm air redolent of pine needles and fertile muskeg and wild fireweed. He couldn’t look away, not even when he felt something falling gently, almost imperceptibly, into his hands.

  When the queen turned for one fleeting second to smile at the screaming throngs below, Abraham looked down at his hands. There lay the large silver bowl, the Millington Cup, the coveted first prize of the World Champion’ship Dog Derby, and, in the bowl, a cheque in the amount of one thousand dollars.

  He had won. He was the king of all the legions of dogmushers, the champion of the world! All realization, all sense, all time suddenly became entangled in some invisible glue. Abraham pulled his stunned gaze from the silver bowl to the Fur Queen’s brilliant smile, where it became imprisoned once again.

  And then the Fur Queen’s lips began descending. Down they came, fluttering, like a leaf from an autumn birch, until they came to rest on Abraham’s left cheek. There.

  After what seemed like years to Abraham Okimasis, she removed her lips from his cheek, expelling a jet of ice-cold vapour that mushroomed into a cloud. Her lips, her eyes, the gold and silver beads of her tiara sparkled one last time and then were swallowed by the billowing mist.

  The next thing Abraham knew, or so he would relate to his two youngest sons years later, the goddess floated up to a sky fast fading from pink-and-purple dusk to the great blackness of night, then became one with the northern sky, became a shifting, nebulous pulsation, the seven stars of the Great Bear ornamenting her crown. And when she extended one hand down towards the hunter on Earth, a silver wand appeared in it, as simple as magic. Now a fairy-tale godmother glimmering in the vastness of the universe, the Fur Queen waved the wand. Her white fur cape spread in a huge shimmering arc, becoming the aurora borealis. As its galaxies of stars and suns and moons and planets hummed their way across the sky and back, the Fur Queen smiled enigmatically, and from the seven stars on her tiara burst a human foetus, fully formed, opalescent, ghostly.

  The Fur Queen disappeared, leaving her cape and crown, and the ghost child drifting in the womb of space, the wisps of winter cloud its amniotic fluid, turning and turning, with a speed as imperceptible yet certain as the rhythm of the spheres. And slowly, ever so slowly, the ghost baby tumbled, head over heels over head, down, down to Earth.

  TWO

  The pinewood sled and eight grey huskies glided, free of gravity, among the northern Manitoba stars, or so Abraham Okimasis would relate to his two youngest sons years later. Occasionally, a stray beam from the frosty midwinter moon became entangled in the ornate surface of the World Champion’ship Dog Derby trophy, and needles of silver light shot out.

  For by the time he had rested a day and a night in an Oopaskooyak hotel and then set off on his journey north — and home — the northwest wind had been replaced by a kinder, gentler wind from the south. Still, the caribou hunter knew only too well how suddenly these winter storms could pounce upon the northern traveller. The evenings were so unseasonably balmy that he drove on well past dusk, for he couldn’t wait to see his wife and children.

  The six nights he spent bedded down by his campfire, under a lean-to of spruce boughs, became one long night. The six days he spent crossing ice-covered lake after ice-covered lake, island upon island — the snow, soft and pure, covering their stands of spruce and pine and tamarack — these six days melded into one. In the grip of the moment when he crossed the finish line, the moment of the Fur Queen’s kiss, he wasn’t even aware that he had entered the southern end of Mistik Lake until he was well on his way across the first great bay. The snow was so white, the sun so warm, the spruce so aromatic, the north so silent; and the moon, drifting from passing cloud to passing cloud, seemed to howl, backed up by a chorus of distant wolves.

  And all the while, among the stars and wisps of cloud, the silvery foetal child tumbled down, miles, light years above the caribou hunter’s dream-filled head.

  At dusk on the sixth day, the hunter caught sight of the Chipoocheech Point headland and his heart swelled, as it always did when he knew Eemanapiteepitat would be coming into view within the next half hour. Chipoocheech Point was a mere five miles south of where his wife awaited him patiently. When he rounded the point and the toy-like buildings began to glimmer in the distance, his heart jumped and his mouth flew open to yodel in a falsetto clear and rich as the love cry of a loon — “Weeks’chiloowew!” — a yodel that always spurred his faithful team of huskies on to even more astonishing feats.

  Before he could count to one hundred, Abraham Okimasis was racing past the lopsided log cabin of Black-eyed Susan Magipom and her terrible husband, Happy Doll. Black-eyed Susan Magipom boldly thrust her spindly thorax out the door, gazing ardently at Abraham as though Happy Doll Magipom didn’t exist.

  “Mush!” the hunter yelled out to Tiger-Tiger, “mush, mush!”

  Before he could count to a hundred and ten, Abraham Okimasis was racing past the red-tiled roof of Choggylut McDermott and his wife, Two-Room; the lonely shack of Bad Robber Gazandlaree and his dog, Chuksees; the house of the widow Jackfish Head Lady, who once had a near-death encounter with the cannibal spirit Weetigo just off Tugigoom Island; the silver crucifix crowning the steeple of the church that had killed Father Cheepootat when its brick wall collapsed on him during confession; the dark-green rectory where Father Cheepootat’s successor, Father Eustache Bouchard, received the faithful, for everything from marriage counselling to haemorrhoid examinations, and passed out raisins to small children on Easter Sunday mornings. And then Abraham Okimasis, for the very first time in three weeks, saw the little pine-log cabin he had built for his wife, the lovely Mariesis Adelaide Okimasis, and their five surviving children.

  He was only vaguely aware that people were gathering: stragglers trundling home from the store at the north end of Eemanapiteepitat hill, young men sawing firewood in front of old log cabins, laughing children romping in the snow with barking dogs, even Crazy Salamoo Oopeewaya arguing with God from a rooftop; all had abandoned their current pursuit and rushed after Abraham’s sled as it raced up the hill towards the Okimasis cabin. Their gesticulating arms, their babbling voices were indecipherable to the tired though elated hunter. His only two scraps of thought were that this ragtag bunch was ready for a party such as it had never had, and that it was clearly Jane Kaka McCrae’s enormous new radio that had spread the news of his triumph throughout the reserve; for there was Jane Kaka, the most slovenly woman in Eemanapiteepitat, braying like a donkey to a gaggle of women with mouths and eyes as wide as bingo cards.

  Before he could alight from his sled, Annie Moostoos, his wife’s addled fifty-five-year-old cousin, renowned throughout the north for the one tooth left in her head, was dancing among the woodchips in the front yard, round and round the sawhorse, wearing Abraham’s silver trophy on her head, like a German soldier’s helmet. How the skinny four-foot widow got the trophy Abraham never did find out, for when he turned to ask, who should be standing there holding out Abraham’s battered old accordion, his face as pink as bubblegum, but his own crusty, half-crazed fifty-five-year-old cousin, Kookoos Cook, renowned throughout the north for having chopped a juvenile caribou in the left hindquarter with a miniature axe and having been whisked off to the horizon by the terrified animal because Kookoos Cook had refused to let go of his only axe. Before Abraham could say “Weeks’chiloowew,” Kookoos Cook had shoved the ratty old instrument into the musher’s hands.

  “Play my dead wife’s favourite jig, play ‘Kimoosoom Chimasoo’ or I’ll never talk to you again.”

  So the caribou hunter pumped and pulled his screechy old accordion, playing “K
imoosoom Chimasoo” like it had never been played, which is how Mariesis Okimasis first saw her husband after three whole weeks: through her kitchen window, her apron bloodied by the shank of caribou she was wrestling with, Mariesis Okimasis, forty years of age, black-haired, brown-eyed, lovely as a willow tree in spring. Her bloodied butcher knife missing Jane Kaka’s left breast by half an inch, she zoomed through the door and flew into her husband’s arms.

  A mere two hundred yards south of the Okimasis cabin, one could have seen the priest in his study, a nail in one hand, a hammer in the other, poised to nail a brand-new crucifix into a wall. No good Catholic danced on Sundays, Father Eustache Bouchard had told his flock repeatedly. He considered marching over to tell the revellers to go home to supper and do their dancing some other day. His hammer came down, very hard, on his left thumb.

  One trillion miles above the aboriginal jamboree, the ghostly foetus continued its airy descent towards Earth. And only medicine women, shamans, artists, and visionaries were aware that a star-born child would soon be joining their dance.

  Mariesis Okimasis had once won a contest for which the prize had been to have her picture taken by an itinerant British anthropologist who had claimed that never in all his travels had he seen cheekbones such as hers.

  “That guy never did send us a copy of the picture,” moaned Mariesis into her husband’s tingling ear as she slipped under him, he over her, their mountainous, goose-down-filled sleeping robe shifting like an earthquake in slow motion. Mariesis could see the left side of her husband’s face, and for this she was glad, for nothing in life gave her more pleasure than the sight of his thick, sensuous lips.

  The moonlight drifting in the little window over their bed made them look like large ripe fruit.

  “That’s all right,” the large ripe fruit breathed into her ear as she struggled with her white flannel slip. “I don’t need a picture when I have the real thing.” He slid out of his underwear.

  The moonlight led Mariesis’s eyes to the floor beside the bed where her sleeping children lay, those four still at home; she listened to their delicate snores wheeze their way in and out of her husband’s heavy breathing, a sweet kitten’s purr floating up to her. Then the light took them to the dresser top, where sat the trophy her champion of the world had brought for her from the distant south. Beside it stood a photograph: Abraham cradling in his arms the silver bowl, his cheek being kissed by the young woman radiant in her white fur cape and her silver-beaded fur tiara: “The Fur Queen,” he had explained, “the most beautiful woman in the world. Except for Mariesis Okimasis,” of course.

  Suddenly, the light was coming from the Fur Queen’s eyes. Mariesis half-closed hers and let this moment take her, out the little window above the bed, out past the branch of the young spruce tree bending under its weight of snow, out to millions of stars, to the northern lights: the ancestors of her people, ten thousand generations, to the beginning of time. Dancing.

  And somewhere within the folds of this dance, Mariesis saw, through tears of an intense joy — or did ecstasy inflict hallucinations on its victims? — a sleeping child, not yet born but fully formed, naked, curled up inside the womb of night, tumbling down towards her and her husband.

  The ancestors — the women — moaned and whispered. Mariesis could hear among them her mother, who had left this Earth mere months after Mariesis had become a bride, one among many to have succumbed to tuberculosis. And though barely audible where she lay in her pool of perspiration, the women’s voices said to her: “And K’si mantou, the Great Spirit, held the baby boy by his big toe and dropped him from the stars …”

  And that was all she remembered.

  Poof! he went on his bum, smack into the most exquisite mound of snow in the entire forest, making crystals of silver spray shoot up to join the stars. He disappeared into the mound and would have stayed down there indefinitely if it hadn’t been for his bouncy baby flesh and his supple newborn bones.

  “If you throw them on the floor,” one-toothed Annie Moostoos would brag about her nine brown babies to all who cared to listen, “they’ll bounce right back into your arms — it’s true. Why would I lie to you?”

  And the baby boy came shooting out of the mound of snow in two seconds flat and landed on his feet, right beside a small spruce tree that happened to be sleeping there. The little spruce tree opened one drowsy eye to see who could have made the whispering bump in the night and just managed to catch the tail-end of a spirit baby sprinting off into the darkness. There being nothing left to see but the little whirlwind in the baby’s wake, the spruce tree went back to sleep.

  The spirit baby ran through the forest, and ran and ran and ran. Hunch led him on, guided him, something having to do with warmth, he knew, something to do with hunger, with appeasing that hunger, something to do with love hunger, with appeasing that hunger, something to do with the length of string that led from the middle of his belly, a string almost invisible, so refined it could have been a strand of spiders web. This string and hunch. That was all.

  Bang! The baby tripped, falling flat on his face, with a shriek more of surprise than of pain, in front of a cave. Growling like an ill-tempered bitch, a large, hairy animal lumbered out of the cave, admonished the prostrate child for having roused him from his winter sleep, and gave him a swift kick in the bum. The baby yelped, jumped up, and dashed away from the cave and its cantankerous occupant through the forest towards a tent standing on the shore of a lake.

  Then the child bumped into a rabbit, who took pity on him, for, by this time, the naked child was shivering. The rabbit slipped off his coat and wrapped it around the child’s shivering, plump midsection. The as-yet-unborn infant made his gratitude clear to the rabbit, who turned out to be a writer of lyric rabbit poetry, and the travelling baby and the now naked, shivering animal would be friends for life.

  Finally emerging from the forest, glinting with crystals of snow and frost, the child ran around the tent by the lake, across the pile of woodchips strewn at the entrance, just missing getting sliced in half by a man flailing away with an axe, and burst through the tent flap like a comet.

  The tent interior glowed golden warm from the kerosene lamp. Moaning and whimpering and crying softly, Mariesis Okimasis lay on a bed of spruce boughs, a minuscule and very ancient woman hovering over her like the branch of an old pine tree: Misty Marie Gazandlaree, Chipewyan, ninety-three years of age and one of the most respected midwives in the north at that time. The silver baby scooted under the old woman’s left arm, took a little hop, two small skips, one dive and half a pirouette, and landed square on top of Mariesis Okimasis’s firm round belly: 5:00 A.M., Saturday, December I, 1951.

  He lay puffing and panting, when the man with the flailing weapon entered the tent, his arms piled high with firewood, his eyes aglow at the sight of the child. And the last thing the child remembered, until he was to read about it years later, was shutting his eyes and seeing up in the dome of his miniature skull a sky filled with a million stars, the northern lights pulsating, and somewhere in the web of galaxies, a queen waving a magic wand.

  The baby boy was floating in the air, his skin no longer silver blue but pinkish brown. As he floated, he turned and turned and laughed and laughed. Until, lighter than a tuft of goose-down, he fell to Earth, his plump posterior landing neatly in a bowl of silver.

  “Ho-ho! My victory boy!” the fun-loving caribou hunter trumpeted to whatever audience he could get, which, at the moment, was his wife. “Ho-ho! My champion boy!”

  “Down! Put him down, or his little bum will freeze!” cried Mariesis Okimasis, though she couldn’t help but laugh and, with her laughing, love this man for all his unpredictable bouts of clownishness. Jumping up and down, the short Mariesis was trying to get the tall Abraham to put his World Champion’ship Dog Derby trophy down so she could put their baby back into the warmth and safety of his cradle-board. This was, after all, a tent, not a palace, not even a house, and this was, after all, mid-December and not Ju
ly, in a region so remote that the North Pole was rumoured to be just over that next hill. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the curl of smoke from its tin chimney, the little canvas shelter would have been invisible, that’s how much snow there was when Champion Okimasis was born.

  THREE

  Atop a low, moss-covered rock that overlooked Nameegoos Lake, Champion Okimasis stood singing a concert to his father and the caribou. The three-year-old stretched and pumped the miniature accordion strapped to his chest with such abandon that its squawk was frightful. Somewhere out on that lake, Abraham Okimasis and his team of eight grey huskies were giving chase, and if Champion performed with sufficient conviction, the Okimasis family would be feasting on fresh hindquarter of young caribou before the sun touched the prong of that first pine tree.